The present invention relates to a plate filter having horizontally arranged filter plates for extracting liquid from a slurry while forming the solid constituents into a filter cake.
In a filter of this type, the filter plates can be pressed toward one another by a locking device and an endless filter band passes between the plates and is guided on rollers, each filter plate being provided with a watertight partition which is provided with channels for guiding the liquid and has a frame-type raised portion along its edges which extends toward both sides of the plate and serves as a sealing surface.
German Pat. No. 1,461,500 discloses a plate filter of the above-mentioned type. In this plate filter, the filter chamber is formed by two adjacent filter plates, the frame-type raised portion being larger toward one side of the partition than toward the other so that every filter plate has the shape of a flat, downwardly open bowl.
It has now been found that for a number of particular fields of use, particularly in cases where the resulting filter cake must be rinsed before the filtering process is completed, the consumption of rinse water can be reduced only by increasing the cake thickness. However, the necessary corresponding increase in the depth of the chamber in the known press is possible only within limits since the drop in efficiency of a plate filter is more than proportional to the increase in the chamber depth.